d the division which her fortune made between them, would
only profit by their brevity when Dorothea had to interpret them: he
felt that in her mind he had found his highest estimate.

And he was right there. In the months since their parting Dorothea had
felt a delicious though sad repose in their relation to each other, as
one which was inwardly whole and without blemish. She had an active
force of antagonism within her, when the antagonism turned on the
defence either of plans or persons that she believed in; and the wrongs
which she felt that Will had received from her husband, and the
external conditions which to others were grounds for slighting him,
only gave the more tenacity to her affection and admiring judgment.
And now with the disclosures about Bulstrode had come another fact
affecting Will's social position, which roused afresh Dorothea's inward
resistance to what was said about him in that part of her world which
lay within park palings.

"Young Ladislaw the grandson of a thieving Jew pawnbroker" was a phrase
which had entered emphatically into the dialogues about the Bulstrode
business, at Lowick, Tipton, and Freshitt, and was a worse kind of
placard on poor Will's back than the "Italian with white mice."
Upright Sir James Chettam was convinced that his own satisfaction was
righteous when he thought with some complacency that here was an added
league to that mountainous distance between Ladislaw and Dorothea,
which enabled him to dismiss any anxiety in that direction as too
absurd. And perhaps there had been some pleasure in pointing Mr.
Brooke's attention to this ugly bit of Ladislaw's genealogy, as a fresh
candle for him to see his own folly by. Dorothea had observed the
animus with which Will's part in the painful story had been recalled
more than once; but she had uttered no word, being checked now, as she
had not been formerly in speaking of Will, by the consciousness of a
deeper relation between them which must always remain in consecrated
secrecy. But her silence shrouded her resistant emotion into a more
thorough glow; and this misfortune in Will's lot which, it seemed,
others were wishing to fling at his back as an opprobrium, only gave
something more of enthusiasm to her clinging thought.

She entertained no visions of their ever coming into nearer union, and
yet she had taken no posture of renunciation. She had accepted her
whole relation to Will very simply as part of her marriage sor